Acquiring new skills or knowledge traditionally involves lectures, where an instructor orally presents material to an audience of participants. Participant involvement, unfortunately, tends to be limited to asking questions when confusion arises. Such one-way communication discourages critical thinking and has been shown to do little to improve the participants' understanding of the presented concepts.
Various teaching methods incorporating active audience participation encourage engagement, enhance attention, and allow the instructor to immediately evaluate the audience's comprehension of new material. For example, a handheld device (e.g., a radio-frequency enabled “clicker” or a smart phone) or web connectivity to a class website allows the audience to transmit answers to questions posed by the instructor using a bi-directional communication system; the answers are collected and presented as, for example, graphical displays, which indicate the degree of class comprehension of the questions. Based on the rapid feedback, the instructor may modify the material and/or teaching pace to ensure that satisfactory audience comprehension has been achieved prior to moving on to the next topic; this improves effectiveness teaching and provides the audience deeper understanding of the material.
Teaching approaches utilizing audience response or web connectivity, however, suffer from a generic problem—a quick-responding participant may respond to an item earlier than other participants and sit idle as she waits for other participants to complete their responses. During this idle or “off-task” time, the quick-responding participant may use the handheld device for non-event-related tasks, such as checking email or logging onto a website such as FACEBOOK. From a pedagogical point of view, such off-task time represents a lost opportunity and, in addition, may hold back the progress of peer instruction and collaborative teaching methods.
Consequently, there is a need for an approach that can effectively and engagingly utilize off-task time, thereby increasing learning productivity.